The aroma wafting from the bowl preceded it to the table. It was such a simple and inexpensive and quick meal that it should not have elicited any great excitement. But this was not the standard Ramen Noodle Soup, This was Margo's Ramen Noodle Soup. It bore little resemblance to the original.

As usual, my wife had done her magic, assisted by her cornucopia of spices. I never asked what she did to her creations, but I knew that there were dried leaves, exotic berries, and powders in many shades and colors in her special cupboard.

Some of the ingredients today I could easily identify. These were vegetables of all sorts. Maybe the light colored pieces were from the stems of cauliflower or from the bulbs of kohlrabi or they were pieces of jacima. The reds I saw probably belonged to ripe red peppers or to carrots, I mused. Not that it mattered right now.

The soup was too hot still and so I slowly swirled my spoon round and round to cool the soup faster, watching the shapes and colors moving along in a circle. And that's when my mind did one of its tricks.

I had noticed this before that sometimes my mind decided to become independent and take off on a path of its own choosing. This time it started in the garden, saying that one gets what one seeds. That one must take care of what's growing. It then switched to thinking about how pretty all the colors rom the garden turned out to be.

From here my mind proceeded to tell me that this is just like life. As the soup benefited from so many different looking, different tasting tidbits, so life would be pretty stale had it not been for the colorful friends we had attracted during our journey.

They were an unusual bunch, nonconformists all, marching to their own drummer; never minding the rest of the world. For that we admired and loved them all, whether they rang our doorbell at midnight, unloading pizza and an octopus, or chasing us out of bed at four on a Sunday morning to treat us to champagne breakfast in the Denver foothills, watching the sun rise over the prairie.

Most of them have preceded us to the Happy Hunting Grounds, leaving us with just memories such as of Sam, our friend Chuck's lion, who always tried to sit in my lap. We had been dragged into the back woods of Idaho to be part of a black powder meet, we have been part of a real native Hawaiian wedding party, and we have participated in a Native American drumming ceremony.

Yes, most of our friends did not fit society's norm, but they were truly friends with golden hearts. Without them our life would have lacked much color and spice.